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About four months ago I read a post by Jeremy Iggers on the MSP WordPress Users Group Google Group. He was looking for people to help start a project teaching WordPress to inner city teens. I thought that it sounded like a great idea, an opportunity to give back to the community, meet some new people and take on a new challenge.

But that’s another story, one that I’ll post about later. The reason I mention it now is that it lead to the project that is the subject of this post. Soon after our first meeting, Jeremy contacted me about the plight of the Minneapolis Spokesman Recorder, a weekly African American newspaper that is celebrating it’s 80th year of publishing in 2014. It’s the oldest minority owned business in Minnesota. Jeremy explained to me that they were having some troubles evolving from paper to digital and needed some help with their website. He asked me if I would take a look at their current site and see if I could give them any help, particularly in the realm of SEO. Oh, and of course, there was no budget. I’m no expert on SEO, not by a long shot, but I figured I knew more than they did and the least I could do was install WordPress SEO by Yoast for them and spend some time training them how to use it. Plus they were looking for any help I could give them on any aspect of the site.

When I installed the plugin, I realized their current site was a mess. It looked like they were victims of the WordPress “seduced and abandoned” syndrome. It’s going around you know. Businesses are sold on the wonderful features of WordPress and decide to have a site built. The developer picks out a theme and puts together a site. Sometimes they just build away, without any regards to or knowledge of the customer’s real needs. They might do everything the customer asks for without thinking about if what they want is a good idea. They don’t do their job as designer and consultant making sure that the site really addresses the business needs that it’s supposed to. They don’t recommend best practices. And even worse, the throw in all the latest bells and whistles simply because they can.

And then they hand the site off to the customer, cash the check and kiss them goodbye. No support, no training and no handholding. Seduced an abandoned.

And then they hand the site off to the customer, cash the check and kiss them goodbye. No support, no training and no handholding. Seduced an abandoned.

There were almost 20,000 tags in 4,000 posts. Many of the tags were used only once. They hadn’t been using the media library, uploading identical photos over and over again instead of using the same one. They had pages that should have been posts and posts that should have been pages. The menu structure was difficult to understand and some of the links went nowhere. They were using a gallery plugin that (shall go unnamed) didn’t upload files to the media library, but put them in a plugin directory, asking for problems down the road. The theme they were using was designed for newspapers, but it left a lot to be desired. They still had “admin” as a user. No one had showed them how to use the ad management system they had. They needed a lot of help.

So we had our first meeting with them went well. They seemed like they would be fun clients to work with. They really wanted to hear what I had to say and seemed eager to implement my suggestions. I recommended that we start from scratch, redesign the site and rebuild it on a different theme. And then I popped the question. “What’s your budget for this project?” The publisher replied, “There isn’t one.” So we talked a little about low hanging fruit, some things we could do quickly to achieve some incremental improvements. I said I’d look things over and come back to them with a proposal.

After giving it some thought here’s what I decided to do. I would rebuild the site for them using Largo a theme by the Investigative News Network based on the Argo project from NPR, that is specifically designed for news organizations. More about theme in the next installment. And I would do it pro bono.

Why pro bono? I’m fairly new to the WordPress scene. I don’t have a lot of work to show potential clients and this would be the biggest project I’d ever taken on. I like a challenge, I like learning. I like expanding my reach. So credibility and interest. Then there’s the fact that I already mentioned, I liked the people I’d be working with right from the start.

You might ask, “But what about the money? How can you forgo that much income?” One reason is that I made it clear that it might take me awhile to get it done because I had to give priority to paying work. The other thing is that I’m semi-retired, I have a couple of regular gigs that keep me busy part-time. I can probably get by without working all that much. I need some money if I want to live the way I want to live, but I’m in pretty good shape. You always hear that retired folks want to give back to the community by volunteering. I decided that’s what this is. I’d rather be building a website than working in a homeless shelter. It’s just more my style.

So I became a hero down at MSR. In the next post I’m going to talk about the theme we’re using and why it’s such a great theme for a news site.

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